Brazil

A documentary film by Oliver Stone

Filmmaker Oliver Stone's 2013 biography of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez details the origins and hopes of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, along with the ceaseless US campaigns of subversion to reverse it. Currently the US has lowered global oil prices in an act of economic warfare it hopes will accomplish what other means have not. The Bolivarian Revolution continues, as Chavez put it, “Peaceful, but armed.”

by Brian Mier

Brazil has the largest population of black people outside Africa, leads the planet in police murders of young blacks. Like their US counterparts, murderous Brazilian cops enjoy immunity and impunity. Besides the article published below, our friends at This Is Hell interviewed Brian Mier...

by Mike LaSusa

The Brazilian government and big business wanted the World Cup very badly. But the people wanted better public services – especially the majority that identify as non-white. “Government studies have shown that people who identify as black or brown make incomes that are less than half those of their white counterparts and they are much more likely to lack access to basic services like security, education, healthcare and sanitation.”

There’s lots of talk about the cultural ties that bind Brazil, the economic dynamo, to Africa, ancestral home to half Brazil’s population and current source of much of its imports. However, “if this was a relationship premised on deep ‘cultural affinity’ as is often stated, Afrikan states would ask Brazil why Afro-Brazilians are consistently being killed by genocidal police/militarized forces.”

Washington smelled blood when the successors to Hugo Chavez won by only a small margin in Venezuelan elections. The U.S. refused to recognize the results, gearing up for regime change. However, “Latin America quickly united to blunt the Yankee offensive in its tracks.” Washington must be taught, repeatedly, that it does not have a backyard to its south.

History has placed the BRICS nations on the path of confrontation with a superpower in decline. Washington is prepared to strangle the world into submission, or drown it in chaos. “Objectively, the United States has positioned itself as the great and implacable impediment to global development.”

African slaves in the US, the Caribbean and Brazil ran away whenever they could. In favorable situations, escaped slaves called maroons were able to form villages and settlements and defend themselves against their former masters. The most successful maroon settlement was Brazil's Palmares, which held out for a hundred years ending in 1695

When there’s a need to gain national prestige, curry favor with imperial power, or seize the opportunity to train your soldiers to occupy other people’s countries, why not try Haiti. To prove it can play with the big imperial boys, the United States and France, Brazil took on a major role in imprisoning the Haitian nation. “Brazil is participating in the usurpation of Haitian sovereignty – and the usurpation of Haitian sovereignty is an affront to the sovereignty of all Black People.”

New census data show two million more Brazilians now describe themselves as black than did so ten years ago, when “they had said that they were not blacks, but 'mestiços' or 'mulattos,' a category more favored, socially.” This is, the author believes, a significant number, proof of the deep impact of the black consciousness movement and Brazil's relatively recent affirmative action programs. At the same time, “slowly but consistently, white people are admitting the real face of a segregationist and racist Brazil.”

After being bled for 500 years by the colonial and neocolonial empires of the North, the nations of Central and South America are defying their former masters and shaking off imperial domination. They are proceeding toward multinational cooperation and integration, forging their own ties in finance, resource sharing, media, economic development and medical research. Asad Ismi and Kristin Schwartz explain how and why despite clouds of lies, threats, bribes, coups and rumors of war , Uncle Sam is powerless to stop them.

Nothing scares the United States more than the possibility that peace might break out. Turkey and Brazil committed an unforgiveable sin, by finding a way to resolve questions about Iran’s nuclear fuel stocks. The U.S. pushed the agreement aside, preferring to move closer to war – as if that is Washington’s desired result.

The gentry-pursued Black and poor population of Chicago got a reprieve from the Olympic committee last week. Now it's Rio de Janeiro's turn to invent clever ways to clear out the shantytowns so the games may begin without the distractions of poverty. Walls are already going up around the favelas, to keep the dark hordes from spoiling the sports.

The International Monetary Fund, that instrument of torture deployed to strip developing nations of their ability to function as sovereign governments, is on it’s death bed. It should be allowed to die and be buried. Yet imperialist circles hope to resurrect the IMF under cover of the current economic crisis. “For imperialism, this is an opportunity to re-impose imperial control. It is a critical moment to reinvest in the capacity of the IMF to impose the ‘debt trap.’” If the IMF zombie rises from the grave, “it means that the runners and the dishwashers, the workers and the unemployed, the peasants and the landless of the world have much work to do. We have to increase the ideological and political work against any and all new attempts to grant this quack doctor a new lease on life.”

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen FordClick the flash player below to listen to, or the mic at left to download a broadcast quality MP3 of this BA Radio commentary.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown "squirmed" as Brazilian President Luiz Inacio da Silva - "Lula" - blamed the global economic crisis on the "irrational behavior of some people that are white, blue-eyed" and "have demonstrated they know nothing about economics." And the non-white world cheered. Da Silva called for creation of a new, "London Consensus" at the G20 summit meeting - "an unmistakable slap at what was once called the ‘Washington Consensus' - an American euphemism for the days when Washington could impose its economic dictates on all of Latin America and much of Africa and Asia."

Today’s economic inequality is the direct result of Europe’s 500-year-long subjugation of the rest of the planet’s inhabitants. Even when corrective measures are undertaken, such as in the New Deal response to the Great Depression, widening economic disparity is often reinforced by the same “blue-eyed” elite that created the crisis. The identical forces that have plunged the world into financial meltdown are responsible for the fact that, in the U.S., “Blacks and Latinos have less than 15 cents for every dollar of wealth held by the median white family.”

Brazil, with the largest Black population outside of Africa, once showed promise of becoming a planetary powerhouse of racial equality and social democracy. In the revolutionary period following France's declaration of the "Rights of Man," Brazilians of all hues and many classes were stirred to action - "conspiracy" - to overthrow Portuguese colonial despotism based on slavery. In the forefront were Black slaves and freemen, and "colored" artisans and soldiers who schemed to achieve a nonracial society in the southern hemisphere. They were repeatedly betrayed by a multi-racial caste of informers, and by an ambitious white elite that "dreamed about the independence of Bahia," the center of Brazil's slave trade and economy, "but were afraid about the liberation of the captives."

The obviously not-dead Cuban leader stands against conversion of food-land to fuel-land, which would initiate a global regime that "spells nothing other than the internationalization of genocide." With billions of people in need of nutrition, how can the world even consider the transformation of fields of wheat and corn and cane into bio-fuels? President Castro draws the line: NO, the world must feed its people, not SUVs. The alternative, pushed by the Bush regime and its corporate sponsors, is mass death.

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